The Arizona law was sponsored by Russell Pearce, a Mormon. The law being considered in Utah was also written by a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Said Joseph Cannon, the paper’s editor, “What are the two commandments? Love God and love your neighbor. These people are our neighbors — incontestably, by any definition, they are our neighbors.”

People protest extending marriage rights to gay couples in Washington, D.C. (Flickr/Fibonnaci Blue)

The NOM donation eclipses what the Knights’ Supreme Council spent on some of its own charitable programs — such as its new effort supporting food banks or its total spending on education initiatives — in the same year, much to the outrage of some observers, including Catholic groups.

“It was a fairly simple, straightforward decision,” says Patrick Korten, vice president for communications for the Knights. “We are pro-family, and believe strongly in the defense of marriage. NOM is the single most important group engaged in defending marriage.”

Less straightforward is the fact that NOM has adopted a policy of refusing to disclose its donors to state election boards, and has sued in the courts rather than complying with existing law — thereby prompting much speculation as to the organization’s sources of funding. (NOM did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) The Knights of Columbus, however, freely disclosed its donation in its August 3 report. The amount was enough to have funded most of NOM’s successful $1.9 million effort to repeal Maine’s same sex marriage law in 2009.

Gay-rights activists have long speculated that the Mormon Church was the primary benefactor behind NOM. But the Knights of Columbus disclosure shows the Catholic group played a pivotal role in funding NOM’s efforts to deny marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples.

Since its founding in 2007 and after its banner moment in 2008 — the passage of Proposition 8 in California, defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman — NOM has fought vigorously against requests from various states to disclose its donor rolls. After some donors to NOM’s Prop 8 campaign received nasty emails from political opponents, the group sued the state of California, comparing itself to the NAACP in the 1950s South. It argued that the state’s disclosure laws had prompted harassment of Prop 8 donors and thereby curbed their constitutional right to free speech.

The case in California is still awaiting a trial date next year, but in the intervening months gay rights activists have openly speculated that NOM was used in the state as a front group for the Mormon Church. The allegation, put forth most prominently by activist Fred Karger, has been vehemently denied by NOM.

Karger, however, did manage to prove through public records that Mormon families contributed a large amount of the $40 million raised for the California ProtectMarriage.com campaign, and that the LDS Church, despite making extensive non-monetary contributions to the cause, had failed to report anywhere near the full amount of its efforts to the state of California. At Karger’s insistence, the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) investigated the case and found the Mormon Church guilty of 13 counts of late reporting, fining them more than $5,000.

Negative press prompted NOM to dive further underground. In fundraising endeavors following Prop 8, the group’s president Brian Brown encouraged supporters of efforts to ban gay marriage to donate to NOM as a means of keeping their names undisclosed. The group would act as a middle man of sorts, raising funds from individuals and turning them over to state-based campaigns in lump sums, all the while pledging to keep its donor names a secret.

“And unlike in California, every dollar you give to NOM’s Northeast Action Plan today is private, with no risk of harassment from gay marriage protesters,” Brown wrote in one fundraising appeal. “Donations to NOM are not tax-deductible and they are NOT public information, either,” another one read.

As promised, NOM ran political campaigns in Maine and Iowa in 2009 without disclosing its donors, promptly suing the state of Maine after it opened an ethics investigation against the group and challenging the state’s campaign finance laws as unconstitutional. (That case, too, is awaiting a final verdict.)

NOM continues to spend millions on its legal challenges in Maine, its deep pockets apparently dictating a strategy to challenge and delay disclosing its donors’ names in the courts as long as possible. But the Knights of Columbus’s role in funding NOM — as well as more overt forms of support for Maine’s Amendment 1 initiative from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, Maine – are prompting Catholics opposed to the Church’s involvement in marriage equality issues to organize and speak out.

“You’ve got this really interesting funnel of tax-free money coming from the Dioceses and the Council of Bishops and the Knights of Columbus directly to these campaigns,” notes Phil Attey, executive director of the newly launched organization, Catholics for Equality. “Why are groups like NOM hiding where they’re getting their money? If it turns out to be a front group for the conservative side of the church, Catholics have the right to know because the majority of American Catholics, and we can show you heaps of polls, don’t support that [kind of spending].”

Knights’ spokesman Patrick Korten sees NOM’s noncompliance with disclosure laws in a different light. “The fact of the matter is that those who favor same sex marriage are working hard to intimidate individuals and groups that support our cause, but [the Knights] are big enough that intimidation doesn’t work on us.”

In addition to the opacity of NOM’s funding, some Catholic activists have also taken offense to the fact that, in an economic downturn, the Knights of Columbus Supreme Council’s funding for anti-gay marriage causes has outstripped the amount of funds it supplied for several deserving charitable programs it highlights in its 2010 report.

“As the recession has continued to make it difficult for people who have become unemployed or underemployed, or otherwise get by on lower incomes, the Knights of Columbus has stepped in to help,” notes the Knights’ 2010 report. It highlights a $1 million fund set up by the Supreme Council to supplement the efforts of local councils to support food banks through its new “Food For Families” program, and it touts its Coats for Kids program, which distributed coats to needy children.

But the Supreme Council’s spending on the two programs together still represents less than the $1.4 million it donated to NOM’s anti-gay marriage efforts in 2009. And the Council also donated an additional half million to NOM and $1.15 million to the California ProtectMarriage.com campaign the year prior. The Supreme Council’s total spending on community projects in 2009 (which include soup kitchens, homeless shelters, well drilling projects, and other forms of relief worldwide) totals approximately $3.5 million — an amount that exceeds its giving to anti-gay marriage proposition campaigns, but not by much. The Council’s spending on educational programs in 2009 totaled barely more than $1 million.

Korten nonetheless contends that the Supreme Council’s donations do not paint a full picture of the Knights of Columbus’ annual giving, calling its donations to organizations like NOM “a very small percentage” of the group’s charitable donations. “The vast majority of our charitable work is raised by local councils and that’s always been the case,” he adds.

But other Catholic activists predict that such spending on conservative causes will provoke a backlash among the faithful. “Do you think someone in New Mexico thought their donation was going to this effort in Maine, as opposed to aiding the sick and feeding the hungry?” asks George Burns, an attorney in Maine who fought NOM’s campaign to pass Amendment 1.

“If Catholics find out that while their parishes are closing, and charity work is being underfunded, that our church hierarchy is playing political games with their money, we believe that they’ll be as concerned as we are,” argues Attey.

The Knights, meanwhile, have come a long way from a lone fraternal council in New Haven to governing over 13,000 councils and 1.8 million members worldwide. “Their heritage was as an insurance company because Catholics were discriminated against and couldn’t get insurance,” observes Rev. Dr. Joseph Palacios, founding board member of Catholics for Equality. These days, however, they’re better known for fighting against the marriage rights of gays and lesbian citizens.

Focus on the Family administration building in Colorado Springs. (Photo/David Shankbone, Wikimedia)

While there has been public scrutiny of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its attempts to influence the campaign to reverse a California Supreme Court ruling allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry, Focus on the Family and related donors pumped more than six times as much as the Mormon church did into the ProtectMarriage.com campaign, records show.

Altogether, donations supporting Proposition 8 from Focus on the Family, one of its major benefactors and an offshoot lobbying organization totaled more than $1.251 million — just shy of the $1.275 million contributed by ProtectMarriage.com’s largest donor, the Knights of Columbus, the Connecticut-based political arm of the Catholic Church. In addition to $727,250 reported by Focus on the Family, major backer and board member Elsa Prince, the billionaire heiress of Holland, Mich., donated $450,000 to ProtectMarriage.com in two cash chunks and the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council, a Christian-right lobbying organization spun off from Focus on the Family and founded in part by Prince’s foundation, chipped in $74,400.

“People are keenly aware of how much money was put in by the hate groups,” said Rick Jacobs, chair and founder of the Courage Campaign, a progressive California organization leading the charge to overturn Proposition 8 in court. “It’s good to get the facts finally out about how much Focus did put in.”

The Mormon church donated $189,000 in nonmonetary expenditures — mostly staff time and airline tickets — to help pass the ballot measure, according to the latest disclosure from the California secretary of state. The church remains “under investigation” by the California Fair Political Practices Commission after a complaint was filed against the church by the anti-Proposition 8 group Californians Against Hate, the Salt Lake Tribune reported Monday.

“One of the reasons the Courage Campaign highlighted the role of the leadership of the Mormon church in this campaign,” Jacobs said, “is that people do not like outside interference. They certainly don’t like having right-wing religious organizations telling them how to live their lives.”

The Proposition 8 campaign was the most expensive social-issue ballot question in national history at just over $83 million, with proponents of the marriage ban raising $40 million and opponents raising $43 million, California election records show. Voters approved the measure with 52 percent of the vote, but both sides are arguing the constitutionality of the measure in state court.

Focus on the Family donated more to the Proposition 8 campaign than has been reported, The Colorado Independent has found. A widely reported sum of “$657,000 in money and services” donated toward the ballot measure by Focus falls short of the total, failing to account for contributions made by the organization as long ago as November 2007 when Focus on the Family helped seed ProtectMarriage.com with a $50,000 cash contribution. The evangelical group spent another $35,650 in December 2007 supporting the anti-gay marriage group with Web ads, e-mail blasts, radio broadcasts, printing and postage, according to a disclosure form filed with the California secretary of state. Total 2008 contributions from Focus on the Family to the Proposition 8 campaign were $641,600, according to disclosure forms filed in January and made available to the public a week ago. A Focus on the Family spokesman didn’t return a call seeking comment.

In addition — though apart from the $727,250 spent directly to pass Proposition 8 — Focus on the Family donated $14,915 in 2007 to the Save Our Kids referendum to overturn a California law that says “no teacher shall give instruction nor shall a school district sponsor any activity that promotes a discriminatory bias because of” homosexuality, transsexuality, bisexuality, or transgender status. That campaign didn’t make it to the ballot, but was a precursor to the Proposition 8 campaign. “After much prayer, consideration and consultation,” Save Our Kids organizers wrote on their Web site, the group decided to “suspend the Save Our Kids campaign to allow our staff and supporters to dedicate themselves to the Marriage amendment (Proposition 8).”

“We were disgusted that a group like Focus on the Family would take people’s money and dump it into a campaign here in California to try to take rights away from people,” Jacobs said, although he tempered his disgust with delight at the layoffs that hit the ministry right after the election. “There is a decreasing market for hate,” he said, “and I think that’s what Focus on the Family is reaping right now.”

Focus on the Family announced on Nov. 17 that it planned to cut 202 jobs companywide, dropping the number of employees to about 950, The Colorado Independent reported. It was only the latest in a series of layoffs and cutbacks suffered by the Christian ministry, which also supports a massive CD, DVD, radio and Web-based enterprise. At its height, the organization, which has its own ZIP code in Colorado Springs, employed more than 1,500 people.

Michigan-based auto-parts heiress Elsa Prince — whose son, Erik Prince, is the founder and CEO of Blackwater Worldwide, the controversial private security firm with annual contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan worth an estimated $500 million — has been closely tied to Focus on the Family for decades. She and her late husband, Edgar, have been key benefactors to Focus and its lobbying arm, the Family Research Council, whose lavish headquarters was financed by Elsa as a memorial after her husband died.

“Anybody who is investing in Focus in the Family ought to understand it’s an investment in a losing organization,” Jacobs said. “In the course of time, they’ll become as extinct as the wooly mammoth.”

Protest outside a Latter-Day Saints temple in Los Angeles. (Photo/pnoeric, Flickr)

The ad, headlined “No Mob Veto,” claims that since Prop. 8 passed, angry gays have engaged in mob-like and threatening actions, some disguised as demonstrations, over the vote to ban same-gender marriage in California.

“The violence and intimidation being directed against the LDS or ‘Mormon’ church, and other religious organizations — and even against individual believers — simply because they supported Proposition 8 is an outrage that must stop,” reads the ad, which was signed by 13 men, representing evangelical Christian, Jewish, Roman Catholic and other groups.

The Mormon Church poured an estimated $20 million into the campaign to pass Proposition 8. After the measure passed, the Temple of the Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City received a scare when white powder was discovered at the temple; it was subsequently determined not to be a known toxin. In the ad, the sponsors alluded to the incident, referring to “thugs” intending to “terrorize” a place of worship.

The assertions drew instant response from gay groups, including the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, urging supporters to write letters of protest to the New York Times and to the Becket Fund.

“The factual inaccuracies made by the Becket Fund in this grossly misleading ad have no place in The New York Times or any credible media outlet,” said Neil G. Giuliano, president of GLAAD, in a statement. “Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and allies across the country have worked to make our voices heard in the face of laws that strip away vital protections for members of our community.

“The peaceful marches and rallies that have occurred since the passage of Prop 8 have given us an opportunity to become more visible and make our voices heard, and it is unacceptable for media platforms, particularly ones as respected as The New York Times, to provide space for groups to make misleading and false attacks that would only seek to silence us.”

In addition, well-known gay activist Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out took out his own ad with the headline, “Lies in the name of the Lord,” and including a depiction of Pinocchio and a Bible.

In Colorado the only reported potentially related action targeting Mormons involved a Book of Mormon that was reportedly set on fire and left burning on the doorstep of he Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Arapahoe County a week after the election. Members of the church said they believed the incident was a response to the Mormons’ support of Prop. 8. No injuries were reported and no suspects were apprehended. The police were investigating it as a hate crime.

Rev. Wes Mullins of the Pikes Peak Metropolitan Community Church in Colorado Springs notes that many gays and lesbians were hurt by the passage of Proposition 8 and anti-gay measures in several other states.

“While it doesn’t surprise me that some people are saying damaging things about the church, as a pastor I don’t think that’s the message of God and I certainly don’t condone that,” he says. At the same time, Mullins underscored the message delivered by the HRC.

“This is an example of blaming the victim instead of focusing on the real issue — it’s about making it about the religious right and victimhood,” Mullins says.